Under the Shadow of Your Wings

“In life there are only the pursued and the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Let me just say this so I can get it out of my system: Apart from clothes, shoes, and accessories, I dislike coordinating. There’s nothing intriguing about it, nothing remotely tantalizing about putting people and dates and times together, and while I do it as ably as the next person, I would rather be doing something else.

Yet from time to time, I find myself coordinating social things like dinner celebrations and team meetings, even bigger events like church gatherings and special occasions, Christmas, Easter, you name it.

Let me clarify. I dislike doing it on my own. Partly because I don’t think I’m very good at it. But put me with someone to do the job, and things start to look more interesting and varied, and I don’t feel I’m pulling the load of rsvps, no-shows, finding alternatives, confirming and re-confirming reservations, sending reminders, the endless chasing. This week, it feels like I’m alone in this.

I am battling tiredness and its other virulent form, discouragement. Pulling people together, even for something as trivial as a dinner party, is starting to look less appetizing as this fleeting year draws to its second-half.

Can somebody else do it, I ask aloud to no one in particular.

For once, I wish I could just show up at an event–be it a group dinner, an events’ meeting–and just enjoy the evening without thinking of who’s coming, who is not, where the food is coming from and who’s getting it, what we do during, and what happens after.

There are times, like this past week, when a text message, without warning, suddenly turns into a conversation with plans afoot, which turns into email exchanges with others, and suddenly the gears started rolling in a machinery of meetings, phone calls, and I find my thoughts embroiled in the details of overseeing an event.

I have been drawn irrevocably into a sequence of things steadily unfolding and I find myself doing what is required of me. I find myself positioned as a go-between, a connector, the go-to person. It is an honour, no doubt, when the entity behind it all is our sovereign Lord, and in the midst of the fatigue and fear of the unknown, there is excitement, and a greater peace that quells the anxious and exhausted heart.

I know that beyond all this activity is an end-result that benefits my community, maybe a path that leads to exciting places I’ve never dreamed I’d reach. My current knowledge of a good and generous and gracious God tells me this. It’s just, — I am so, so, tired.

So I thank You, Jesus, for the adventure of the coming days, and may You get all the glory for entrusting it to someone who has never quite accepted her role as a coordinator in the Kingdom.